Category: Poetry

Reckless Pilgrims / Allison Thorpe

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RedklessPilgrimCoverWelcome to the rich world of storyteller Allison Thorpe. The beauty, which “lived in all things”, the “Giveth and taketh away moments”, the speaker’s “carrying the crease/ of some sharp-eyed certainty” illuminate the day-to-day living and the war within and without. Plants and animals take front stage with the metaphors of their lives, relationships, functions and interactions. “How often do we look up/ for warmth, beauty, answers?” asks this book and the fortunate reader who takes the journey will be well- rewarded with insight.
– Katerina Stoykova – author of Second Skin
Do not be misled by the title of Alison Thorpe’s newest collection. Each word, every line of this welcome book is carefully evaluated and arranged. Her tender examination of place and memory is steadfast and clear-eyed, never maudlin. Conflicts, natural and human, are grappled with, resolved, mourned, even celebrated in these lush poems. Here, the rotation of seasons brings specific gifts – harvested bounty or the marauding threat of winter. There, one might find the “recklessness” alluded to in the title – the abandon of spring, when nature indulges itself with color and abundance. Even as she turns away,
with equal parts of sorrow and confidence, to take up city living, her “eyes hurry to that
green slash of life/that earthy illusion of roots” which carpet her memories and lost
mountain hollows. Thorpe’s plea and mantra can be distilled to this line: “May we find
value in what we are/ Not in what we lack.” Looking back on the absences she considers,
those shadows of the past, we share her delight and abiding pleasure in what was and is
still there, always at hand.
– Brigit Truex, poetry editor, Hopper Journal and author of Sierra Silk
Rooted in both the love of a local place and the poesies of Kentucky, Allison Thorpe’s
poems are emblems of change that teach us to search, know, and then “relearn our heart.”
Thorpe’s “green theater of spreading hills” is a pilgrimage through a life rich with
wonder, love, damage, and loss. We are guided by the voice of the poet-farmer singing
the “joyous seeds of hope” as well as the poet-pilgrim who never shirks reality: “fever,
fires, insane / men who rule the world.” These remarkable poems navigate the unique and
striking journey of living a particular life with communal details and astonishing imagery
and pull us “like a rogue tide” toward “the next luring bend, sparkled, drenched.”
– Marianne Worthington, poetry editor, Still: The Journal

Publication Date: March 1, 2021
Paperback, 104 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-79-3

Purchase at: Broadstone Books

Sculling on Tawas Bay / Richard Douglass

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August 2021

Glistening calm as the sun breaks over the far horizon
Not a ripple, not a wave, not a crest or movement
Faint late summer fog rising
As if the mass of water was silenced for a moment in time
Stroking easily, 18 feet of ash wings
Catch, draw, pull, catch, repeat – rhythm of movement
The sliding seat in opposition to the draw on oars
scullThe touch of blade to water
Behind me a sweeping arch
My wake, nearly delicate, marked on each side
Parallel pools of disturbed water
Blade markers of my path, a pattern of my past
The horizon now glowing with sunlight
The stillness on the shore
Now strays into morning,
the moment has passed into a day

Richard Douglass / Tawas City, Michigan

I am 20 months beyond my wife’s death. She prepared me for her dying, but the passage of time needs nurturing if I am to fully heal. One of my tonics is sculling, a single shell with ash oars, on Tawas Bay early in the morning. It is healing, like meditation in motion. So today I put my morning’s row into words.

Pearls / Corey Mesler

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My mother did not save much except
money. She was not nostalgic.
There are no drawings I did in
fifth grade, no old report cards, no
favorite toys. I miss my Matchbox
and Corgi cars, my Beatles 45s
on Capitol, my old Mad Magazines
and Ripley’s Believe it or Not
paperbacks. All gone to garbage
trucks or garage sales. She handed
little down. I have a couple of my
father’s WWII medals, but none
of his letters home. My mother gave
my wife her string of pearls. It is
this one gift I want to talk about.
Tight with money her entire life she
was overly generous at the end. My
wife and I don’t go out much. We
don’t entertain. But there was an event
where we dressed up, a speech I
had to make. I found my old suit,
purchased at the Salvation Army to
get married in. My wife wore a simple
black dress and upon the breast she
laid that single strand of pearls.
They were like small lights, like prayer
beads, like dreamstuff. They were like
my mother, simple, surviving, hanging on.

Corey Mesler / Memphis, Tennessee

 

COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published eleven novels, four short story collections, six full-length poetry collections, and a dozen chapbooks. His novel, Memphis Movie, attracted kind words from Ann Beattie, Peter Coyote, and William Hjorstberg, among others. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart many times, and three of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On, which won The Memphis Film Prize in 2017. With his wife he runs a 144 year-old bookstore in Memphis.